Really, this is ridiculous and inappropriate. This thread is not about Trump, not about unlikely theories of climate change, not about screwy economic theories, and not about anything else, except a theory that those that have accumulated the most wealth are - just possibly - scheming to reduce the rest of the humans to a population level where it is less likely the elites will be distracted by them.

Again, I find myself advocating the minority position. If this desire to "cull" the rest of us is real, we need to know, so that we in turn can cull the elites. There are not many of them that stay a mile and a half or more away from common humans. A mile and a half being approximately the extreme range of a .50 BMG sniper rifle.

Have you guys ever done the simple math of what this thread title is stating? It means that after 90% of the worlds population is culled we would still have 750 million globalists remaining...... that is still a shit load of globalists!

Many of us have mentioned this figure of 500 million or a billion as being in the ball park of where we suggest our population has to fall back to.

Kind of odd eh?

Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Apeblog: http://blog.mounttotumas.com/website: http://www.mounttotumas.com

You have probably heard me bandying about the world carrying capacity of 125 Million to 1 Billion. These estimates come from an article in National Geographic magazine I read in the last decade, although I don't remember the issue. The lower bound assumes current technology and agrarian lifestyles - modified low tech and similar to how the Amish live. The upper bound of 1 Billion assumes tech not yet in evidence including extended recycling of damn near everything. Niether bound is anything but an estimate, and it's kind of a moot point - the human race blew through the one billion humans figure in 1804, a mere six years after Malthus published. We have been in overshoot for 213 years by those estimates, with steadily accumulating ebnvironmental damage we commonly call the Sixth Great Extinction.

The temporary planetary overshoot carrying capacity is enabled entirely by our FF exploitations and will end when those fuels become too valuable to burn, which around here is referred to as "the correction", "the big power down", TEOTWAWKI, etc.

Silly AGW fanboys would have you believe that all we do is stop burning FF's, and we will be SAVED. This is total damn foolishness, because:

1) There is no central authority controlling prices or exploration or investments to recover newly discovered FF supplies. Chaos rules, modified by human psychological factors. The bounds for the "doom date" I favor are on the order of 110 years, stated differently, the order of 20-200 years, with the center of the Guassian probability at 110 years from today. (That forecast actually was 4 years ago when I joined Peak Oil, so the current most probable "doom date" is 2123 and the boundary dates are from 2033 to 2233 AD.) Within the lower and upper bounds, the probability of collapse approaches unity. Other estimates, models, and SWAGs (Scientific Wild-Assed Guesses) are possible. Pick yours.

2) For those obsessed with AGW, we have spewed enough carbon already to put us at an average global temperature that has not existed on the planet for millions of years. We approach the current Climatic Optimum of this particular Milanković cycle and it's higher than any seen in about 600 thousand years before the present day. I personally think that assigning doom due to climate change is foolish, because I believe that the feedback mechanisms at play in climate are predominately negative, and that carbon pollution is self-correcting and limited by nature. We will know enough to positively put to rest the AGW controversy in 1200-12,000 years by observing the temperature record, no sooner or closer dates are possible, since the state of the art computers are ill-suited to modelling climate.

3) Both population modelling and FF supply models are dominated by the variables of human psychology. Just when enough people recognize Doom and become dysfunctional for all practical purposes is a total unknown. Thus modeling is a useless endeavor we are attempting with inadequate data on inadequate computers. No further discussion required.

Since oil production peaked recently and the Malthusian population was exceeded 213 years ago, just hang on and enjoy the ride. The Titanic did not sink without numerous large bubbles to disturb the lifeboats, rafts, and people already in the water.

Ibon wrote:Have you guys ever done the simple math of what this thread title is stating? It means that after 90% of the worlds population is culled we would still have 750 million globalists remaining...... that is still a shit load of globalists!

Many of us have mentioned this figure of 500 million or a billion as being in the ball park of where we suggest our population has to fall back to.

Kind of odd eh?

Only if some imagined level of technology will allow that number to maintain a high level of industrialization while having a lot of time for leisure.

That’s not set in stone. We’d have a global treaty mandating CO2 reductions now if Obama hadn’t derailed the treaty signing at the 2009 COP meeting in Copenhagen

At some point we’ll boot out Trump and throw the Paris Accords in the trash and go back to trying to craft a UN treaty that will regulate, tax, and reduce FF use going forward

Cheers!

The UN is a toothless tiger and can't enforce anything beyond voluntary restrictions. Continuing to hope for human beings to cease their burning ways is nothing but self deception.

I should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write, balance accounts, build a wall, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

The point is moot anyway. There is a built-in delay of 50-70 years in most of the climate models. If a miracle happened and we stopped burning all FF's today, temperatures would still increase for at least that long, nobody alive today who's old enough to understand the controversy would ever see a difference. I happen to believe that the bulk of warming is natural, and the contributions of mankind insignificant, but the point is still a moot one, the temperatures are going to increase at least 1200-12,000 years, according to Milanković.

Tanada's correct, there is no controlling authority, and it would seem that both China and India are not committed to reducing either FF usage or population growth, so what anybody in the Western World does, absent a wall around their country, is also moot.

Climate changes are off topic in this thread, unless your intent was to make the point that CC is the mechanism of population control. Which I do not believe for one moment, it is the collective decision of virtually all 7.5B - AGW believers or not - that the stopping FF consumption is not for them, but for everyone else.

The litmus test for this is simple. True believers in AGW don't own vehicles with fuel tanks, don't consume grid electricity, and don't consume foods transported with petroleum fuels. So you can easily sort true believers from hypocrites in an instant.

I fail to see why you insist Kaiser on trying to paint AGW as irrelevenant. When in fact it is extremely relevant all the more so because I happen to agree with you and Tanada, that we are NOT collectively, goinig to stop using FF and emittiing CO2. So, I went as far as insinuating that we could possible go extinct because of climate change. Ibon is right that the population reduction will improve the negative impact we are having on the planet. So even with all the environmental degradation and dysfunctions evident now and into the future, I would not presume that we would go extinct as the Earth has a marvelous regenerative capacity. But AGW could be different as it qualifies in accord with the paleolithic record as something that causes MASS EXTINCTION EVENTS. It even is implicated in the worse one that happened about 250 million years ago. So, having read some about this, I cannot rule out that AGW by itself without even including the other environmental damages including nuclear fallout from all the nuclear reactors, could be daunting enough to cause our extinction. So in that context, your ruling out AGW as anything significant seems preposterous to me.

It's an entirely pragmatic viewpoint. Once you accept that "stopping global warming" requires that the world at large stop using FF energy, you realize that won't happen until the time easily accessed FF's are exhausted. Then you factor in that there has been enough carbon spewed into the atmosphere already to cause the warming to continue for decades beyond today. Finally you realize that a human lifetime is not long enough to see who was correct about AGW, we are all going to die without having our opinions confirmed or disproved.

That's about as moot as it gets.

mootmo͞ot/Submitadjective1.subject to debate, dispute, or uncertainty, and typically not admitting of a final decision."whether the temperature rise was mainly due to the greenhouse effect was a moot point"synonyms: debatable, open to discussion/question, arguable, questionable, at issue, open to doubt, disputable, controversial, contentious, disputed, unresolved, unsettled, up in the air"a moot point"

I would say that moot is what you fix as a narrative in your mind. The future is only as fixed as you convince yourself it is. We can all safely predict that over population will create constraining pressures moving forward. That's about as broad a brush as I can paint the future with. I leave so much open as an unknown because we have no ability to pinpoint and predict the nature of the events that will unfold and how humanity will respond.

Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Apeblog: http://blog.mounttotumas.com/website: http://www.mounttotumas.com

KaiserJeep wrote:Tanada's correct, there is no controlling authority, and it would seem that both China and India are not committed to reducing either FF usage or population growth, so what anybody in the Western World does, absent a wall around their country, is also moot.

At this point in time yes. And moving forward I can hardly see how any nation will surrender their sovereignty over to a ruling authority in reference to limiting consumption for their population in any kind of global agreement especially when physical constraints move into the non discretionary part of survival like food security and basic infrastructure.

I am more and more convinced that the break down of globalization is one of the key conduits of solving our over population. Each continent, each nation, each bio-region will increasingly be left to their own resources. Global alliances will contract.

Looking back the Paris accords may end up being as good as it gets

Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Apeblog: http://blog.mounttotumas.com/website: http://www.mounttotumas.com

And didn't we already get a taste of that with the election of Trump and his platform of Protectionism and closing the borders and bringing back the jobs and canceling trade agreements. It does seem that we Americans are sensing a diminuation of our prospects and are not looking favorably to acting with largese wtr to the rest of the world. Trump has also mentioned withdrawing funds from the UN and also asking for others of NATO to pay their fair share. So, he seems to be astutely tapping into the zeitgeist of our nation. Sorry a bit off topic

onlooker wrote:And didn't we already get a taste of that with the election of Trump and his platform of Protectionism and closing the borders and bringing back the jobs and canceling trade agreements.

It seems that way, but it's not a reaction against Malthusian lifeboat ethics.

Trump's reactionary agenda is largely a reaction against globalism at a time when it is in full bloom. That is why most analysts see it as a futile gesture against the unavoidable tide. The xenophobia is mostly about the fears of those still reeling from the credit crisis not wanting to see greater competition for low-end labor, despite the fact those jobs are already vulnerable to the automation tsunami.

Remember that despite the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer in the US, we're not lacking in basic necessities. That is why even the poor are overweight let alone obese. We will not see lifeboat ethics until we start to see some serious shortfalls in global grain harvest leading to price spikes and shortages. It will take quite a while to get to that point because the global food system is surprisingly resilient, far more resilient than doomers give it credit for.

“If and when the oil price skewers for 6 months or more substantially above the MAP, then I will concede the Etp is inherently flawed"--Onlooker, 1/1/2018

I think that the petroleum fuels we use to plant, cultivate, and harvest grains and other food plants are less resilient. Not to mention that the refinery dregs are that viscuous "bunker fuel" used to transport food and everything else, and the coal that is mined with petroleum fuelled machinery and transported via diesel trains.

Of course, it's not like somebody will turn off a switch, there won't ever be a fast crash - it will take decades before oil breaks through the $100/barrel milestone for the long term. But I remember when it was $147/barrel in 2008, and even then the economy did not shut down, and it has since declined to $30 and this week was at $54.

Population control --family planning, mother and child healthcare, reproductive health-- is back in the news with enhanced momentum. A few years ago some leaders who were encouraging their citizens to produce more children because the optimal size for economic development hadn't been reached have abruptly changed their minds. In support of population growth, they argued that Europe and North America developed fastest when the population was growing fastest. They reasoned that birth control for the Developing World advocated by the Industrialized World was designed to create conditions for the re-colonization and continued exploitation of countries in the South. The rapid population growth in the now developed countries provided adequate labor for industries and markets for finished products which the developing countries also need. They emphasized that ipso facto developing countries need more economically active population to drive national economies to take- off and into